广外英教0809学年第一学期期末考试B卷

广东外语外贸大学英语教育学院

《英语阅读》08--09学年度第一学期期末考试试题B卷

考核对象：教育系（或学院）08级考试时间：60分钟

Section A Reading (1’×22=22’)

Directions:In this section there is one selection followed by 25 questions. Write the answers on the Answer Sheet.

Conflict and Cooperation

1Like other forms of life on this planet, human beings confront a basic task: to deal satisfactorily with their conflicts and thereby secure the advantages of community and cooperation. Unlike other forms of life, human beings are endowed with a capacity to reflect on this task and to search for better solutions by conscious thought and deliberate choices.

2The task of overcoming conflicts and achieving community and cooperation arises because human beings are unable and unwilling to live in complete isolation. The advantages of cooperation and community life are so numerous and so obvious that they must have been evident to man from earliest times. By now, our ancestors have closed off the choice; for most of us the option of total isolation from a community is, realistically speaking, no longer open.

31Nonetheless, however strongly human beings are driven to seek the company of one another, and despite thousands of years’ practice, they have never discovered a way in which they can live together without conflict. 2Conflict exists when one individual wishes to follow a line of action that would make it difficult or impossible for someone else to pursue his own desires. 3Conflict seems to be an inescapable aspect of the community and consequently of being human. 4Why conflict seems inescapable is a question that has troubled many people: philosophers, theologians, historians, social scientists, and doubtless a great many ordinary people. 5James Madison held that conflict was built into the very nature of men and women. 6Human beings have diverse abilities, he wrote in The Federalist, and these in turn produce diverse interests.

4“As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it,” Madison wrote, “different opinions will be formed.”Different opinions about religion, government, and other matters together with attachments to different leaders have “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”Thus, he concluded, “a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.”

5Whatever the explanation for conflict may be, and Madison’s is but one of many, its existence is one of the prime facts of all community life. Yet if this were the only fact, then human life would fit the description by the English political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan (1651). Hobbes describes mankind in a state of nature — a condition without government — having little in the way of agriculture, industry, trade, knowledge, arts, letters or society. “And which is worst of all,” he concluded in a famous sentence, to exist without government would mean “continual fear, and danger of violent death and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

6But life is not so dismal. A condition of totally unregulated conflict is, as Hobbes himself argued, obviously incompatible with community life. Along with the human need for living in communication with fellow human beings and the inevitable conflicts that are generated whenever people try to live together, as far back into the past as one can pry, there have been traces of a search for ways in which human beings can cooperate. Means have been sought for settling conflicts within a community without extensive violence and bloodshed, according to standards of justice held, at the very least, among those who enforce the rules. We cannot pause to probe the mystery; but the evidence is so great that we can safely accept it as a fact.

7Thus our existence as social beings —social animals, if you prefer —is conditioned by a set of contradictory tendencies that, taken altogether, make us members of some political system:

1. Our need for human fellowship and the advantages of cooperation create communities.

2. But we are unable to live with others without conflict.

3. Consequently, communities search for ways of adjusting conflicts so that cooperation and community life will be possible and tolerable.

8The third stage is the turning point — from men and women as social animals to men and women as political animals. If conflicts are to be settled, somewhere in the community there must be individuals or groups with enough authority or power to secure— or compel — a settlement. Someone must make sure that the parties to a conflict abide by the judgment of the ruler, existing rules, their own agreement, or law. At any rate, human communities do not seem ever to have existed without some such powers — without, that is, political institutions.